This post contains stale information.
Please go here for the latest.
Damn. Looks like the analyst world is going to be a hell of a lot smaller in the next few months.
So, with that in mind, who is going to be the unbiased source of information for companies?
[here ]
This article has seen a lot of traffic today. If any of the folks reading this have more info on this story, drop me a line.
Travis Smith points to this AP article on the death of the family in the two-income world. [here]
The ZenWife and I have discussions about this topic on a regular basis. We are a one-income family by choice and by restriction (Visa restrictions prevent ZenWife from working in the US). However, the concept of scheduling our children’s lives to the point where we are using other people to raise and rear them is broken and failed in my mind.
I am not anti-activity. I believe that a child who is to be properly socialized in today’s world needs to interact with and engage in some structured activities with other children/people.
However, as much as they drive me/us nuts, ZenWife and I are the main caregivers to our children. I work 7AM – 4PM every day to ensure that I am home for supper, bathtime, stories and tuck-in.
On weekends, the boys and I try and do at least one activity together. As a family, we do one big outing every weekend. The boys are free to do what they want, when they want, with parental consent. They play. they build. They draw. HeirSon is better with a hammer than I am, and I caught him using the cordless drill one day (he’s six), complete with eye-protection, and I did not object because he knows how to use it!
My boys are extremely imaginative. SpareSon tells incredibly inventive stories, and loves to give visitors a tour of the house, describing each room in detail (he’s 3.5).
So, will my kids be the MBAs of the future? Will they lead corporations and make decisions that change the course of history?
Probably not.
But my children will be able to think, adapt, and dream. And to me, the ability to do these things beats the structured, scheduled, contolled thing called “existence” that is described in the article. It is not a life; it is an existence.
Give your kids a life.
Lots of inward-looking thoughts from some of the VC blogs that I read.
Jeff Nolan flames alarm:clock for claiming that VCs are greedy, soulless vampires [my paraphrasing].
A VC and Brad Feld comment on Paul Graham’s Essay, “A Unified Theory of VC Suckage”.
I wonder why so much attention is now being focused on the VC community? I kinda like them, as they have provided me with two very solid companies to work for over the last 6 years.
My opinion, not backed up by any facts or knowledge, is that there is a new bubble occurring, and people are already looking for someone to lay the blame on when it bursts.
The VC community, on the other hand, has learned a lot over the intervening years. To claim that they are going to let the madness that occurred 1995-2000 to occur again is highly unlikely. The bubble is occurring because there are smart companies driving smart ideas to people who are now ready to use them.
Now, whether the VCs will drive this bubble like they drove the last one remains to be seen. I think that the caution and conservatism (if that word can be applied to the VC community) that arose from the flame-out in 2000-2001 will see more firms driving their own success through the methods seen in Paul Graham’s other essay, “How to Start a Startup”.
Either a joke or a simple error, Amazon has listed a Viewsonic monitor as a computer having a 10GB chip, 2,000 DIMM, a 30,000 GB hard drive and weighing 14 hundredths-pounds. All for $2,312.95. Certainly, there will be computers that powerful someday soon but not right now. One reviewer raved about the “product,” writing, “This laptop is the bargain of the decade. 10.00GHZ of power. I use one to currently calculate the meaning of life, the universe and everything. I even caught it calculating on how to make the perfect cup of tea. The speed that this laptop can move at is nothing short of outstanding. Shame it doesn’t have legs though.”
Another one of the comments on this product.
I got one of these for the multi-OS capability. So far, it runs HP-UX, Red Hat, BSD (2 flavors), XENIX, OS X, AIX, AppleDOS, Solaris, DG-UX, Netware, Debian, Mandrake, CP/M, QNX, Win 3.11, Win95, Win95b, Win98, Win98se, WinME, WinCE, Os/2, NT [34], Windows server 200[03], DR-DOS, & BeOS, all in separate windows. Couldn’t load SCO – licensing issues. We also managed to get Lotus Agenda working pretty well; we dumped the entire Internet into Agenda and were able to solve most of the world’s crimes and determine who on the planet is related to whom. And we were able to use the included Cray Supercomputer Simulator (4 instances simultaneously) to beat Deep Blue and Baby Blue at chess, at the same time. Nice machine. But I think soon I’ll need an upgrade.
As soon as the characters started speaking in this vicious and detailed bit of parody, I knew it was Canadian. [here, 32mb MP4]
And sure enough, Avion Films is a Canadian ad agency.
I miss my home country.
care of Site-9.
Daimler/Chrysler, in yet another feat of misunderstanding of the US market, is missing out on the chance to sell the single coolest car in the world in the US: The SMART Car.
Peter Davidson points out that D/C is thinking of killing the SMART in the US.
This is a shame, because this means that I will never have the chance to lust after a SMART, the same way I lust after a Powerbook, Moleskine, and a really good professional digital camera.
Daimler/Chrysler: I am in your most desirable demographic. I am looking for a new car. I WANT a SMART Car.
How do you plan to deal with that, Daimler/Chrysler?
Seth Godin pointed this out. [here]
They will probably start legal action against me for posting this.
Travis Smith points out that Google, out of the goodness of it’s heart while trying to raise awareness for World Water Day, accidentally crushed the Web site of the group organizing this event, worldwaterday.org. [here]
Travis poses the excellent question about asking your Web provider how they will handle a huge spike in traffic. Can you throttle bandwidth? Does it make sense to recruit a content-delivery network to help distribute the load?
The other question I have is: Did Google tell/ask the World Water Day group about putting their site on one of the busiest pages of the entire Internet?
Nothing like being ambushed by well-meaning folks.
The UNESCO site for World Water Day is still up, if you would like more information. [here]
While Robert Scoble represents the “Look at all of the cool things we’re doing” side of Microsoft, Mini-Microsoft shows us the dark, Dilbertian side of the NimbleBeast (Should I trademark that?).
In his latest post, Mini-MSFT points out how the HR process has become almost Orwellian in it’s self-referencing duh-ness. I am not sure I could work at a company that is described this way.
So if you’re a Microsoftie, take a moment to go through some of the new, emerging competencies nested in the Career Model site. The old competencies pretty much represent crisp, common-sense focused attributes divided into four increasingly challenging levels. The new competencies seem to be a cut-and-paste job of buzz-worded business jargon arbitrarily divided into four columns of no particular difference. For instance, in one of the competencies there are attributes in Level 4 that I sure know I’d be fired for not doing every day an issue came up at work.
Indeed.